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Use of digital media channels is growing in public communication. Given the importance of public trust in government figures and agencies, combined with the risk and fear of misrepresentation inherent in online interaction, it is important to develop theoretical frameworks for investigating the ways in which authenticity is constructed in online public affairs communication. The purpose of this paper is to produce a preliminary model of authenticity in online communication, with particular emphasis on public institutions.

The paper first develops a theoretical model of authenticity from existing literature in various disciplines. It then uses that model to explore a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the comments on the US State Department blog, DipNote, from its inception to the end of the Bush Administration.

Despite limited interactions between DipNote authors and commenters, the types and quantity of responses to posts indicate a desire by some readers to discuss the topics raised in the blog space. These responses also suggest that at least some commenters find that the blog meets their criteria for authenticity to the extent necessary to engage in community‐type interaction within its virtual boundaries. A functional‐structural analysis of the blog responses supports the essential components of the theoretical model proposed, which suggests that DipNote presents a mixed form of authenticity.

Authenticity is particularly important in the public sphere, and public institutions are increasingly engaging with social media as a means of connecting with constituencies. This paper proposes a starting‐point for theory development regarding this significant emerging area of communication.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact on usage of the journal Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) moving to an open access model. A major objective was to examine the impact of open access in the context of other initiatives that have improved accessibility to scholarly journals. The study also aims to demonstrate the potential of deep log analysis for monitoring change in usage over time.

Data were gathered from the logs for the period 2003‐June 2005 and analysed using deep log methods. The data were analysed to provide the following information on use: type of item viewed; usage over time; usage for individual journal issues; usage per type of article; age of article. Usage analyses were further examined with regard to the following user characteristics: subscriber/non‐subscriber; referrer link employed, organisational affiliation; geographical location.

The analysis showed that the rise in use of NAR over the survey period (140 per cent) could largely be attributed to the opening up of the site to search engines and that the move to OA had a relatively small influence on driving usage up further (less than 10 per cent).

The study for the first time thoroughly analyses the usage data of a significant experimental open access journal and reveals the huge impact of search engines on driving up usage.

In an effort to better speculate whether a certain set of factors plays a role in information professionals’ choice of Internet search tools, this article describes a survey conducted by the author of MSLS/MSIS graduate students and professional librarians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Background discussion on Internet search tool design, usability, field testing, and future development is provided. Two sets of factors were defined for this study, one describing utility functions of search tools, the other describing the convenience or ease of use of search tools. The survey reveals a trend in choosing a preferred Internet search tool based on utility factors as opposed to convenience factors. It also suggests a preference for search engines as opposed to subject catalogs. Comprehensive, encompassing results are found to be more important than ease of use of a particular search tool.

In the UK, Masters level discipline-specific courses in sustainability integrate modules on the social, economic, and environmental issues of sustainable development. The postgraduate faculty teaching on these courses and the student cohorts enrolling in such courses bring varying attitudes, experiences, and beliefs to the ecological and anthropological discourses and practices about sustainable development. Existing studies of education for sustainable development (ESD) have identified strengths and weaknesses in the knowledge and attitudes of students and faculty although few studies have focused on postgraduate cohorts and fewer still have attempted to compare and contrast students and lecturers. This mixed method case study analyses findings from data collected (2016–2017) from student surveys (n = 121) and semi-structured interviews with faculty (n = 21) recruited from multiple university departments, centers, and programs (n = 12) to identify prevailing anthropocentric and eco-centric ideas and rationales about sustainable development and ESD. Findings suggest a strong orientation to mainstream sustainable development in both groups but analysis identifies reasons for resisting a focus on extremes of “deep green” or “green wash” approaches. In addition, prevailing belief in academic neutrality, institutional and disciplinary factors, student pragmatism, and other drivers are highlighted. The study concludes by identifying potential paths from prevailing (experiential) education in sustainable development to more transformational approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of LexiURL as a Web intelligence tool for collecting and analysing links to digital libraries, focusing specifically on the National electronic Library for Health (NeLH).

The Web intelligence techniques in this study are a combination of link analysis (web structure mining), web server log file analysis (web usage mining), and text analysis (web content mining), utilizing the power of commercial search engines and drawing upon the information science fields of bibliometrics and webometrics. LexiURL is a computer program designed to calculate summary statistics for lists of links or URLs. Its output is a series of standard reports, for example listing and counting all of the different domain names in the data.

Link data, when analysed together with user transaction log files (i.e. Web referring domains) can provide insights into who is using a digital library and when, and who could be using the digital library if they are “surfing” a particular part of the Web; in this case any site that is linked to or colinked with the NeLH. This study found that the NeLH was embedded in a multifaceted Web context, including many governmental, educational, commercial and organisational sites, with the most interesting being sites from the.edu domain, representing American Universities. Not many links directed to the NeLH were followed on September 25, 2005 (the date of the log file analysis and link extraction analysis), which means that users who access the digital library have been arriving at the site via only a few select links, bookmarks and search engine searches, or non‐electronic sources.

A number of studies concerning digital library users have been carried out using log file analysis as a research tool. Log files focus on real‐time user transactions; while LexiURL can be used to extract links and colinks associated with a digital library's growing Web network. This Web network is not recognized often enough, and can be a useful indication of where potential users are surfing, even if they have not yet specifically visited the NeLH site.

More knowledge about open access (OA) scholarly publishing on the web would be helpful for citation data mining and the development of web‐based citation indexes. Hence, the main purpose of this study is to identify common characteristics of open access publishing, which may therefore enable us to measure different aspects of e‐research on the web.

In the current study, five characteristics of 545 OA citing sources targeting OA research articles in four science and four social science disciplines were manually identified, including file format, hyperlinking, internet domain, language and publication year.

About 60 per cent of the OA citing sources targeting research papers were in PDF format, 30 per cent were from academic domains ending in edu and ac and 70 per cent of the citations were not hyperlinked. Moreover, 16 per cent of the OA citing sources targeting studied papers in the eight selected disciplines were in non‐English languages. Additional analyses revealed significant disciplinary differences in some studied characteristics across science and the social sciences.

The OA web citation network was dominated by PDF format files and non‐hyperlinked citations. This knowledge of characteristics shaping the OA citation network gives a better understanding about their potential uses for open access scholarly research.

This paper seeks to examine a librarian‐faculty divide in authors' OA contributions with regard to article self‐archiving and OA consumptions with regard to citation counts.

This paper measures the OA availabilities and citations of scholarly articles from 20 top‐ranked LIS journals published in 2006. A logistic regression analysis is taken to make the comparisons.

It finds that there is no correlation between the numbers of OA articles and the professional status of the authors. However, librarian authors differ from faculty authors in the citation and self‐citation rates of their articles. There are also differences between these two groups of authors in co‐authorship and the numbers of article pages and references.

This study takes a new approach to compare the publications of librarians and faculty in library and information science for their open access availability and citations. The findings may help OA advocates and administrators to make appropriate policy changes.

Karl Marx could only pen the memorable line, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” because he was heir to the sanitary and public health reforms of the nineteenth century (Marx [1848] 1972, p. 335). The Black Death, which had wiped out much of fourteenth-century Florence and which had regularly decimated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, was now but a faint memory. Yet had a historian of some earlier period of European history thought to pen a line as presumptuous as Marx's, it might have read: “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggle with plague or pestilence.” Epidemics and pandemics have haunted human societies from their beginnings. The congregation of large masses of humans in urban settings, in fact, made the evolution of human infectious disease microorganisms biologically possible (McNeill, 1976; Porter, 1997, pp. 22–25). Epidemics have been as determinative of the course of economic, social, military and political history as any other single factor – emptying cities, decimating armies, wiping out generations and destroying civilizations.